Earlier this week I saw a bunch of people on my twitter stream retweeting a bit of interesting film trivia: That the 1996 Pauly Shore/Stephen Baldwin “comedy” Bio-Dome was originally scripted as Bill & Ted 3. I was surprised as I had never heard this before. A quick google search showed that the information wasn’t new, as it appears on hundreds of websites across the interwebs. The problem is that many of the webpages (which include some credible movie sites in the mix) provide the same minimal piece of info, and don’t expand upon the story. IMDB’s Trivia section (which, yes, is user submitted like wikipedia) has the largest explanation:

A third sequel was planned, but was canned after Keanu Reeves, and later, Alex Winter, declined to reprise their respective roles. The script, which had already been written, was instead modified slightly, re-casted, and recycled into Bio-Dome (1996).

It’s a cool bit of trivia, but does it even make any sense? Bio-dome takes place completely inside a scientifically created closed ecological system, and doesn’t venture from modern (1996) day at all. How could a script involving time travel be re-purposed for a self contained story like this? It smelled a little fishy to me so I decided to ask someone who might know… Alex Winter (the actor who played Bill S. Preston in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, and later went to star and direct in the cult classic Freaked). He’d likely know something about this right? Find out what he said after the jump.